"May 2006." / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, Dept. of English. / "May 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 36-39)

Virginia Woolf wrote both prose and poetry, both fiction and non-fiction: she was both a creative writer and a politically conscious reporter. She left a wealth of beautifully crafted observations and comments that continue to be immensely quotable and influential. Feminist critics today use Woolf's vocabulary to continue the feminist conversation which she entered early in her life and consistently influenced as long as she lived and wrote. My purpose in this essay is to identify some of the ways in which feminists strategically use references to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own to empower their own perspective or to develop legitimacy for their own knowledge and discourse. / Graduation date: 1992

In Aphrodite Unshamed: James Joyce's Romantic Aesthetics of Feminine Flow, I trace the influence of romanticism and anthropology on Joyce, and argue that he renews by classicalizing an ironic romantic genre also inspired by anthropology, the fairy tale arabesque. Created by the random cobbling together of fairytale types, plot elements, and set pieces, the arabesque's context was early anthropological work on folktales in Germany. I argue that, basing his fiction on this "nonsense" genre, Joyce mines the works of Homer, Shelley, Walter Pater, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl in order to promote--indeed, to narratively model--an abandonment of honor culture in favor of a neo-archaic culture of spiritualized sexual love. To do this, Joyce brings down to earth the airy Aphrodite of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and sexualizes the serpentine narrative trope Pater uses to aestheticize her power--both by chiasmatically structuring his fiction. Joyce envisions a world in which "cultural" men, because they sacralize and no longer shame female sexuality, participate in women's "primitive," i.e., not fully cultural, being. Indeed, I argue that, borrowing from Lucien Levy-Bruhl's conception of the mystical epistemologies of "primitives," Joyce viewed women as modern "primitives" capable of revitalizing overly intellectualized, alienated, and violent masculine Western culture. By creating recursive chiasmatic constructions of characters, images, and plot, Joyce creates layers of narrative infinity signs that body forth the unending "primitive" feminine rhythm that he makes the signature of his work. I argue that his work reveals that he viewed women as less than fully cultural, i.e., closer to rude animal life and the blunt forces of nature by virtue of sex, menstruation and child-bearing. He implicitly argues against the "new woman" and for women's continued "primitivity" in the service of his new, still male-produced, culture. His cooption of what he considers women's "primitive" essence is thus meant to be a source for cultural renewal for modern Westerners.

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No study of Virginia Woolf can do justice to the complexity of her life and work without taking into account the numerous contradictions present in her thought. Though Woolf is recognized as a revolutionary contributor to the development of modernism, it is also important to remember that she was born in 1882 and that the nineteenth century also left its mark on her. The first chapter will examine this double sensibility. The second chapter will trace the development of Woolf's modernist aesthetic. She was obviously rebelling against the realism valued by her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors when she conceived of a literary style capable of abstracting from purely formal elements a more "profound reality" than that captured by objective and representational descriptions. Despite this revolutionary tendency, she constructs a hierarchy of "realities" that is somewhat elitist in its mysticism and runs counter to the revolutionary feminist and Marxist thought evident in so much of her work. The last chapter will examine the contradictions that riddle Woolf's feminist writings.

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